Change of Heart starts with a moment, when I am visiting my sister’s killer in prison for the first time. As I am filling out the form to sign in at the guardhouse, I come to this box: “Visitor’s Relationship to Offender.” That stopped me cold. Until that moment, my relationship with him was like this: Him, murderer. Me, murder victim’s family member. I had put us on opposite sides of a divide, one that separated him from me, putting him on the “bad” side and me on the “good.” My book tells the story of how that changed: how I came to see that both of us—killer and victim’s survivor—are beloved children of God, how both of us are flawed and fallen and in need of mercy. How I couldn’t go on not caring about him, but instead, had to do what I’d previously thought was impossible: pray for him. Reach out to him, first, before he ever apologized to me for his crime. The book is about the promise of that kind of change, the hope of redemption for even the worst, the transformation of what we think is impossible into the possible.

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Jeanne Bishop

Jeanne Bishop is the sister of Nancy Bishop Langert, who was shot to death at age 25 along with her husband and their unborn child. Since the murders of her family members, Jeanne Bishop has been a prominent advocate for gun violence prevention, abolition of the death penalty, exoneration of the innocent and the role of faith in the debate over executions.